Here are two audio interviews with the great tenor Coleman Hawkins I found on YouTube. There are no notes stating when the interview is from or who the interviewer is—if anyone has any info, please let me know, and if I come across other info I’ll update. Hawkins speaks about being born at sea, playing dances when he was young, and not finishing a gig at Jimmy’s Chicken Shack until three in the afternoon.
—Peter Blasevick
Today, a great 2009 interview with the legendary Sonny Rollins From Stuart Nicolson and Jazz.com. Topics the great tenor saxophonist covers here are greats Charlie Parker and Clifford Brown, his theory of improvisation, and more. From the interview, on improvising:
In fact, in a way, improvisation is making the mind blank. When I’m playing, I’m in a trance. I’m not thinking of anything. Sometimes I’ve thought about a nice pattern I wanted to play, maybe a little riff on the song. It’s very clever and I’d think about it and go, ‘Oh yeah, this song I’ll put in this clever riff, it’ll really sound clever, everybody will think I’m clever!’ But I can’t do it, because when I think about putting it in someplace, the music has gone by so fast that it doesn’t work, so I just forget it. Just absorb it and it comes out at some weird time and for some weird reason from the subconscious, so I’ll play it, but don’t try to manage it and put it in to a solo. So that’s what I have learned about music about improvisation and it’s beautiful. I think somebody told me Miles [Davis] said something like that, he learns something and he forgets it because you can’t be creative if you know too much about what you’re doing.
Hey, this is our 200th post! I hope everyone who visits the site finds it fun and useful; please let me know if there is anything you want to see (or see more of!)
This week I will be linking to some great video interviews from the JazzTimes YouTube page. There is so much more there than I’ll be posting this week, so be sure to check it out!
Today, three clips with tenor great Joe Lovano from the 2012 Newport Jazz Festival. In the first, Lovano talks about playing at the Newport Jazz Festival with various groups and about the festival’s legacy, along with some of his favorite jazz albums that were recorded live at Newport; in the second he discusses creating a band inspired by the music of Wayne Shorter; in the third, he talks about his early musical education and development, including his first instrument, his first paid gig and what he learned from his father, a noted sax player around Cleveland. Interview by Lee Mergner
—Peter Blasevick
I’m posting interviews from AllAboutJazz.com all week. Their mission is to “provide information and opinion about jazz from the past, present, and future,” and they do a good job of it!
Today we celebrate the late, great Dexter Gordon’s 90th birthday. Gordon was a focal point of the bebop and hard bop revolutions, and later in his career, he achieved the status of an American icon with his lead role in Bernard Tavernier’s 1986 film, Round Midnight, which garnered him an Academy Award nomination. Gordon’s wife and longtime manager, Maxine Gordon, has kept the legacy strong through lectures and guest appearances, donation of all of Gordon’s archival work to the Library of Congress, the licensing group Dex Music LLC and The Dexter Gordon Society.
Maxine is also a serious scholar, and is finishing her PhD at NYU in preparation for her biography of Dexter, which is due out this year. During this 2012 interview with Victor Schermer, she responds to a comparison of her exhaustive work to that of Monk’s biographer Robin Kelley:
“Actually, Robin was my adviser. I did the research for him on the San Juan Hill neighborhood in Manhattan where Monk came of age. But my biography of Dexter is somewhat different. I’m writing more of a cultural history, and a large part of the book is in Dexter’s own words. He did a lot of writing—vignettes, letters. While he was in Europe, he wrote letters to Alfred Lion and Frank Wolff at Blue Note. I have placed all those letters, his and theirs, in the Library of Congress. I became an archivist, and put together three Dexter Gordon collections in the Library of Congress: first of all, his papers. Then, in Culpeper, Virginia is the recorded sound—all his CDs, tapes, and 78s. Finally, there are the letters, music manuscripts, photos, and documents. My research for Dexter’s biography will utilize these collections extensively.”
I can’t wait to read her biography of Dex, but until then, we have this interview:
Here is a really cool four part video interview with the late, great saxophonist Michael Brecker. It is kind of a hybrid interview/lecture that includes performances, and it has plenty of Michael discussing his influences and the like. He even sits behind the drums and plays a tune with the band!
As the great Wayne Shorter approaches his 80th birthday, he’s just reunited with the label that championed him as a bandleader back in the 1960s, Blue Note Records. On the new album Without a Net, he leads a quartet with whom he’s spent more than a decade through live recordings and some striking new compositions.
Speaking with NPR’s Laura Sullivan, Shorter says he absorbed a common principle from Davis, Coltrane, Blakey and his other great peers and mentors: They left their musicians alone.
“The six years I was with Miles, we never talked about music. We never had a rehearsal,” Shorter says. “Jazz shouldn’t have any mandates. Jazz is not supposed to be something that’s required to sound like jazz. For me, the word ‘jazz’ means, ‘I dare you.’ The effort to break out of something is worth more than getting an A in syncopation.
“This music, it’s dealing with the unexpected,” he adds. “No one really knows how to deal with the unexpected. How do you rehearse the unknown?”
This week I’m posting interviews from the music journal The Jazz Review, which has been wonderfully preserved at the great website jazzstudiesonline.org. Founded by Nat Hentoff, Martin Williams, and Hsio Wen Shih in New York in 1958, The Jazz Review was the premier journal of jazz in the United States. Short-lived as it was (1958-1961), it set an enduring standard for criticism. All the interview links point to the full .pdf for that issue, so it might take a second to load. Worth the wait!
Today I’m linking to a early 1959 interview with Wayne Shorter. LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) gives a nice background of the legendary tenor’s growing up in Newark, NJ, and speaks with Shorter about his contemporaries and his time with Maynard Ferguson and Art Blakey. From the interview:
“What it comes to is seriousness! Nothing comes to anything unless you’re serious about it. Man, that’s the only things I dig. . .serious people doing serious things…otherwise, there’s not much to it. Of course, there’s such a thing as serious humor too. You know? Like Monk. Man, that cat’s jokes are dead serious! To me, that’s what people like Sonny and John represent, a really serious approach to music. And with people that are constantly improvising, you can see the real accomplishment. It’s amazing! At least, it amazes me. John especially. I mean, he doesn’t ever stop taking care of business.”
The last day of JazzVideoGuy week here at TNYDP; thanx Bret for all you do for Jazz. Check out his channel on YouTube, there’s just a ton to watch.
And what week of interviews from JazzVideoGuy would be complete without one from his favorite subject, the incomparable Sonny Rollins? In this piece, Bret explores the unique relationship between John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins, two of the most important Jazz musicians in history.
— Peter Blasevick
I’m going to list a few interviews from talk show host Tavis Smiley’s archive of shows this week. Todays is a 25 minute long 2011 talk with the great Sonny Rollins. From the interview, Sonny responds to Smiley’s question about the legend’s constant search for improvement:
“Music is one of these things…there’s no end to music. If you are the type of person that can absorb it, it’s there to keep doing more. I’m that type of person, I want to do more. Cause look, I’ve been with some great, great musicians and I know what this greatness i,s and I heard great musicians coming up. I wanna get there…I don’t think I’m there yet.”
Not there yet. Yikes.
— Peter Blasevick
I’m posting interviews this week from Mel Martin’s great site. In this cool 1986 interview, the great tenorman Stan Getz speaks on a number of topics, including his future recording plans and his master plan for jazz education as the 1986 Artist-in-Residence at Stanford University. Here he is from the interview discussing how he developed his sound:
“I never consciously tried to conceive of what my sound should be. I never said, ‘ I want this kind of sound!’ I believe it was because of the bands I played with from the ages of 15 to 22. The first one was Jack Teagarden, who we all know played trombone, but his sound was so great, so…(pause) sort of legitimate, and effortless. I never tried to imitate anybody, but when you love somebody’s music, you’re influenced. Then I was with Benny Goodman when I was 18 and I believe his sound had an influence on me; such a good sound that he had in those days, you know? And, in-between I heard Lester Young of course, and it was a special kind of trip to hear someone like Lester, who sounded so good and almost classical in a warm way. He took so much of the reed out of the sound. I really don’t know how I developed my sound, but it comes from a combination of my musical conception and no doubt the basic shape of the oral cavity. I did always try to get as much of the reed out of the sound as I could.”
— Peter Blasevick
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